Street Shoppers, Charleston, South Carolina
Oil on canvas
22 1/4 x 16 3/8 inches
1931
As exhibited in:
Beyond Catfish Row: The Art of Porgy and Bess, 2016, The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina
Over the course of a fifty-year career that spanned continents, media, and aesthetic schools, Biddle created works that gave expressive form to his own experiences and the changing face of twentieth-century life. Biddle was heavily influenced by Diego Rivera, evident in the strongly demarcated facial features and exaggerated physical forms in pieces such as Street Shoppers, Charleston, South Carolina. At the invitation of DuBose Heyward, author of Porgy, and the composer George Gershwin, Biddle visited Charleston in 1930. For two months, he sketched genre scenes and figure studies, many of which were later developed into finished studio canvases. A selection of his illustrations was ultimately published in Gershwin’s original 1935 libretto for Porgy and Bess.
Other works by this artist